DARPA Robotics Challenge

The disaster-response robotics competition whose 2015 Finals were, until the NIST baseline benchmark, the last standardized performance evaluation of humanoid robots. NIST designed tests for the DRC in 2013–2014, and the NIST baseline benchmark is explicitly built on that work.

Why it matters to this index

The eleven-year gap between the DRC Finals and the NIST proposal is the reason this index has to score published specifications: for that whole period there was no standardized, neutral measurement of humanoid capability to score instead. It is the historical baseline against which the current benchmark effort should be read.

No results have been published under this protocol for any robot in the index. This ledger records only results actually published under the protocol — never a vendor capability claim reinterpreted as a measurement, and never a figure inferred from a spec sheet. It stays empty until there is something real to put in it.

Sources

• https://www.nist.gov/el/intelligent-systems-division-73500/humanoid-robot-baseline-performance-benchmark
• https://www.therobotreport.com/nist-proposes-a-baseline-performance-benchmark-for-humanoid-robots/